The last several days have been dedicated to designing the first dungeon for my practice game. What does that mean specifically?

It means that I drew up a basic outline of a massive dungeon, erased it, started over, began filling in details to make it actually look like a dungeon, added in some humans to fight, added in random monsters to fight, added in hidden treasure chests down certain paths, added in a riddle puzzle room, added in a maze room, added in a miniboss, and then completely revamped the battle system twice . All of that and I only have half of the first dungeon done.

The battle system has changed from being strictly a turn based system to being an Active Time Battle System that uses each characters Agility stat for how quickly their turn comes up. This means that someone with high Agility may get to attack someone with low Agility twice before they get attacked. But that also means that the low Agility character may have a higher attack rating and hit harder. On top of that I’ve added in a Battle Results screen that shows how much EXP you earned, how many Job Points you earned (more on that in a second), and what loot you got from the battle.

Okay so the Job Point system is basically a way to let players have more freedom in how their characters develop. Rather than making you learn Skill A at level 2 and Skill B at level 4, now you will unlock multiple skills at different levels, but in return you have to earn and spend Job Points to unlock them for use. An example would be that maybe a Mage can learn a fire, ice, electric, earth, and wind spell at level 3. But you want to specialize in fire and earth, therefore you have the opportunity to spend your job points and only learn the skills you want rather than be handed skills you may never use. However, skills will not be cheap; this is so that players won’t be able to just purchase all of the skills right away. It forces you to specialize with certain skills.

On top of that, I’ve began taking on QA testers for my game and boy has that been an experience! Having a handful of people play through my game multiple times and tell me all of the bugs and things that need tweaked has been such a massive help. They’ve ran into things that I meant to go back and fix, things I didn’t know were even a problem, and things I didn’t know worked the way they did. I’ve gotta say, having QA testers this early on in the process may have slowed down my development of the game, progression-wise, but it has made it a much more polished game for it.